Church Math

I love math. I know it’s hated by so many people but for me it brings about a sense of reason and logic into almost every area of my life. One place you wouldn’t think of math being important is church. However, church math is my favorite. Here are my five favorite church math facts:

1. All it would take for our church to regularly worship over 700 people is for every person who currently goes to our church to bring one friend. (Everyone bringing one friend is a lot easier than Pastor David bringing over 300 friends.)

2. If everyone who went to our church gave up one cup of coffee a week and gave that money to the church, we would have an $100,000 to do ministry. That equals feeding 400 kids a year through the backpack program or doubling the amount that goes to our children, youth, and worship ministries each year.

3. If you go to church every week but don’t go to a small group or do anything else to deepen your faith, you’ll spend 52 hours a year at church. That’s less time than you’ll spend on the toilet and it’s less time than you have from the time you leave work on Friday until you go back to work on Monday. Joining a small group is the easiest way to double the amount of time you spend in spiritual development and will get you connected to other Christians to walk along side you.

4. If you used the audio version of the Bible, you could listen to the entire Bible in about 70 hours. That means 12 minutes a day lets you read it all within a year.

5. 85% of Americans become Christians between the ages of 4 and 14. If we want to have the greatest impact on our mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world, it is going to start with kids and youth ministry.

Why do all of these numbers matter? Well, first of all, if I were to say our goal in the next three years is to worship 700 each Sunday and to bring in an additional quarter million dollars for ministry, it sounds impossible. But when you realize that all that takes is each one of us bringing one friend to church and giving up a cup of coffee a week it suddenly sounds much more doable. None of this is asking you to change the world or do something radical. It’s asking you to do simple things that add up to monumental changes.

Think Small, Go Home, Give Up

We’ve had a lot of exciting growth in our church over the past year. I’m looking forward to all the things God will do in and through our church this upcoming year, but I think the key to any church success can be summed up by saying think small, go home, and give up.

Think Small

There are two ways to approach thinking small. The first is to think of the smallest members of our church, the kids. And trust me, Christine would love to talk to you about how kids ministry is the most important ministry with the highest long term success statistics. But I want to really talk about the other take. We are not a small church. I don’t know. If you’ve realized this or not but we are regularly worshiping over 300 on Sunday mornings and are trending towards 350 in average worship. Not only does that mean we are in all statistical categories a mid-large sized church but we are also bigger than 90% of churches in America. Whether we like it or not, it is impossible to know everyone and everything that goes on inside our church. It might feel like you can get lost in the crowd, which is exactly why we need to think small.

The average person, no matter what size church they go to, can recognize and name about 60 people from their church. You have to become intentional if you want to know more than that. I’ve found that the best way is to start small. Instead of thinking you can talk to everyone in a worship service, try focusing on just your section in the sanctuary. Turn those roughly 50 people who sit in your section of the room into your primary church family. Learn their names, ask about their dog. Whatever. It’s easier to make connections with a smaller group of people than trying to connect with every single person in our church.

But small groups are by far the best way to stay connected to a group of people from the church. We also firmly believe that spending time in a small group is a key factor in growing in your faith. When you get sick or go through a crisis, it’s your small group who is able to come along side you, pray over you, and even get a meal train going. So while we’re experiencing this kind of growth in our church, the first step is to think small.

Go Home

The christian life is not just about the couple of hours you spend on our campus each week. In fact, it’s primarily lived out through your time at home and where you work. There are countless resources about that, so I won’t bore you with another guilt trip. However, I do want to throw out a possibility. What would it look like if you opened up your home to a small group? What if after church you invited the new family out to lunch, or maybe better yet to your house for lunch? And let’s get really radical for a second, what if you actually talked to your friends and neighbors about coming to church with you? It doesn’t have to be anything special, and in fact there’s the perfect opportunity coming up. “Hey, I don’t know if you have any plans for Easter but our family’s going to the 8:00am service and we’ll save a seat for you if you want to join us.”

Give Up

They’re some of the most famous opening words of any Christian book, “It’s not about you.” When I talk about giving up, there’s a lot going on. None of it matters though until you come to the realization that Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. If you have gotten to this point in the blog, I’m guessing you consider yourself a Christian which means you have already been found and saved. There are thousands of people in Navarre who can’t say that and Jesus came for them. So the first step in giving up is to know why you’re giving up. It’s so that we can get out of the way and let Jesus be God.

So we give up the notion of our preferences being the most important thing. We give up the idea that someone else should do it. We give up our time and our money to help fulfill our church’s mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. We give up the idea that it is about us.   

If you want our church to grow, think small, go home, and give up.

In 1492...

A little over 500 years ago a captain was forced to beach his two ships on the island of Jamaica. His crew and he would have starved to death except for the generosity of the indigenous people. They brought the stranded sailors food in exchange for little trinkets, but once half of his crew went wild and killed some of the locals, the food supply understandably stopped. Faced with starvation, the captain went onto his ship and pulled out his almanac. He checked a few charts and then went to speak to the local chief. Columbus, (yes that Columbus) told the chief that God was very angry that they had stopped giving them food. If the chief didn’t bring them more food then God was going to blot of the moon as a warning sign of what He would do to the people. Three nights later, right on schedule, there was a full lunar eclipse. As the locals started to freak out over their doom, Columbus offered to intercede in exchange for a steady food supply. The locals jumped at the chance to escape their doom, and Columbus went back to his cabin for the 40 minutes of the full eclipse. Just before the moon started to escape Earth’s shadow, Columbus came back out and told the locals that God had forgiven them. This nifty little trick saved the lives of Columbus and his crew, who continued to eat well until they were rescued 4 months later.

This is an incredible story. There’s a part of me that can’t believe that Columbus had the guts and knowledge to pull off a con of this magnitude. But every bit of awe and good impressions is immediately overwhelmed by the knowledge that this trick led to the deaths of several natives who were subsistence farmers, who only grew enough for them to eat, not enough to feed all the extra people. Not only that, but Columbus used God as a weapon by lying and manipulating people.

This level of manipulation is, hopefully, obviously wrong. But how many times do we weaponize God for our own purposes? Several years ago when one of my kids got in trouble, Hannah was having her chat with him about how different people knew what he had done and that they were disappointed in him. Then she said “And God knows what you did too.” My kid lost it. He had been holding back tears before but once he knew that God knew what he did it was over. I was the horrible parent trying not to visibly laugh.

While I don’t really know if that was crossing a line or not, I don’t have to look very hard or far to see examples where Christians have used the concept of God to augment their own arguments or point of view. Its an election year, just wait for all the candidates to interject God into policies that are anything but based on God.

Look at your own life. How have you used the concept of God as a tool? Better yet, how many times have you let God use you as an instrument to do His will? This isn’t a feel good story, but maybe we can learn from it and do better ourselves.

Remember the Fourth

Sometimes you end up writing something that you know is great advice, but you are absolutely horrible about following it yourself. This is one of those times. Learn from my mistakes, but more importantly, keep me accountable.

There are a multitude of things that we know are sins and that we have no problem judging people on. We can all hopefully agree that murder and stealing are wrong. Lying is frowned upon, especially when someone is lying to you (we try to make up our own excuses for why our lies aren’t bad). Cheating on your spouse is devastating to way more than just the two people involved. Like I said, these are pretty obviously wrong, and it’s one of the reasons why they were included in the ten commandments.

The first three commandments are almost the definition of calling oneself a Christian, and then there’s the second half that we already covered a bit. But there’s this pesky fourth command that we ignore. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. I don’t want to get into the debate between Saturday and Sunday, worship, old covenant/new covenant, or the legalism that Jesus had to fight. But maybe we should start from the assumption that God wasn’t crazy for telling us to take a break.

And that’s where my struggle is. I am not great at taking a break from work. Even when I’m not physically at work I’m thinking about work, or playing catch up around the house trying to get all the chores done. It feels like there is always the next thing on the list that needs to be done. The worst thing is, I look at other people who always seem to be doing something and think they are busier than I am and that maybe I need to do more. I know I’m not alone, but being a workaholic is a culturally accepted, and even sometimes revered, sin.

God never intended us to work all the time. We have to take regular breaks, and it just so happens that God gave us a pretty easy to remember standard. One day a week. One day where, for all intents and purposes, you relax and rejuvenate. You take the time to worship God, and you do as little as possible beyond that.

I’m not here to tell you exactly what it has to look like for you. After all I’m fully admitting I have a problem with my own healthy boundaries. However, after just going through the busiest month of the year where my own body tried to betray me and tell me to take it easy, then having a vacation where I did puzzles and hung out with family, its important for you to take the time to figure it out. Leave room for God to work in other people as you step back and let God rejuvenate you. One way or another, life will eventually go one without you. You are a child of God, and we all know kids need naps. Seriously, be like Jesus, take naps.

A Christmas Miracle

Christmas is the season of perpetual hope. There are miracles on 34th street, Grinches returning roast beasts, wonderful lives, and even ghosts. But just to show that anything can happen at Christmas, I’m going to do a real Christmas blog for once, and it’s even on one of my favorite Christmas songs.

If you want to listen to the song, you can click here to listen to it on spotify. Chris only used two verses in this recording but he nailed the feeling of the song with the two that he chose. The lyrics are:

O come, O come, Em­manu­el,
And ran­som cap­tive Is­ra­el,
That mourns in lone­ly ex­ile here
Until the Son of God ap­pear.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
shall come to thee O Israel.

O come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer
Our spir­its by Thine ad­vent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark sha­dows put to flight.

Ok, I can fully admit that this is not the cheeriest Christmas song, but I really can’t think of a better Advent song. Advent is all about the waiting of Jesus to come. First it was about the second coming of Jesus and now has been tied together with the birth of Jesus. We often play the part of Ricky Bobby and just want to focus on the 8 pound 6 oz baby Jesus because it’s our favorite time of year and we can celebrate. But we miss the context of the 600 years of waiting from when Isaiah prophesied about the Messiah to his actual birth. Israel was conquered and exiled, their people scattered across the known world. The only hope the exiles had was for God to do something miraculous. Yet the miraculous didn’t happen.  Not when they were exiled in Assyria or even when they were exiled to Babylon or conquered by the Persians and Greeks. It was 6 centuries, and dozens of generations before the promise was fulfilled.

The words of the first verse are referring to a literal time and place in Biblical history. It acknowledges that they were mourning, lonely and separated from where they wanted to be and that in that state the only hope is Jesus. This moves into the refrain of rejoicing because Emmanuel, God with us, is coming to Israel. I think most people take this line and in their heads it’s actual rejoicing, but for me it’s the head trying to convince the heart that it will be ok. It’s living in the messiness and despair of exile while clinging to a not yet seen hope which is perfectly seen in the second verse. If they have already rejoiced, why would there be a plea for God to have to cheer their spirits and disperse gloomy clouds?

Christmas isn't just a celebration of joyful moments but a recognition of the shadows that precede the light. It's about acknowledging the expanse of time, the generations that waited, and the faith that persisted through the darkest hours. The beauty of this song lies not only in its melody but in its portrayal of the human experience—waiting, longing, and holding on to hope against all odds.